Do you have what it takes to be a Fight Night warrior? Fight Night is back - for our 11th year - on 24 May 2018. 20 fearless channel contenders will once again immerse themselves into the brutal world of boxing to raise money for their chosen charities.

What opportunities will the enlarged company offer partners, and what can they expect from the vendor in the second half of 2018? All will be revealed in this web seminar, which will see Datto SVP Mark Banfield lay out the vendor’s plans and discuss the investments it is making in its UK business.

Many businesses are moving to the cloud. In fact, 12% of SMBs have already made the move, and by 2020, 50% of SMBs will have moved all of their business systems to the cloud. Take advantage of this huge market opportunity by becoming a cloud service provider for your existing business.

To grow, to remain relevant to the customers, and to remain profitable, IT channels (in all their forms) will have to master a number of business model transformations in the cloud and digital transformation era. Read more to learn about the key transformations that IT channels will need to address, in order to bring new capabilities to customers and be successful in the future.

Charles Ferland weighs up the alternatives for storage traffic in the
datacentre environment

With fibre channel-over Ethernet (FCoE), you do not need separate fibre
channel and Ethernet networks, potentially slashing the operating cost. But is
it what your customers need?

Different networking technologies have been deployed to address certain
characteristics required by the applications. For example, fibre channel offers
low latency and guaranteed orderly frames delivery, which is exactly what the
storage world requires. Ethernet connects servers because it is fast, easy to
configure and cheap.

10GB Ethernet (10GbE) datacentre bridging (DCB) or converged enhanced
Ethernet (CEE) is a single switching technology that offers low latency,
losslessness, low cost and low power, and the IEEE has been developing standards
that should help Ethernet become a reliable lossless network suitable for
transporting storage traffic such as FCoE.

FCoE requires a 10GbE DCB infrastructure if it is to work. FCoE adapters
exchange with the Ethernet switches to find out if the network is DCB-capable.
This exchange will fail if the adapters are connected to a ‘normal’, non-DCB
switch.

The adapters should provide a seamless transition while encapsulating
everything into Ethernet frames. In essence, FCoE is still fibre channel, just
over a new wire.

Since there are few storage devices supporting 10GbE natively and a huge
fibre channel legacy, FCoE gateways will be required to encapsulate and
de-capsulate FCoE traffic between the fibre channel and Ethernet worlds.

All that really changes is the transportation in the middle, which is now
done over a reliable, lossless, low-latency 10GbE network instead of having a
separate and expensive fibre channel switching infrastructure.

The advantage of FCoE is network convergence, not FCoE itself. So we can use
different technologies to achieve the same benefit.

Technologies such as iSCSI, CIFS and network file system (NFS) data storage
have matured and benefit from the speed, latency and continuous advantages of
the new 10GbE DCB infrastructure. Unlike FCoE, IP-based storage solutions can
work with ‘normal’ Ethernet.

They do not require DCB because they can handle, for example, loss of packets
or packets arriving in different orders and increased latency. The applications
themselves have ways to handle this. Of course, it is not ideal and does affect
performance.

There are huge advantages of using these IP-based storage solutions over
10GbE DCB networks. If packets are not being dropped, they do not need to be
retransmitted. And there is also a way to regulate the flows within DCB that
makes any IP storage solutions run faster and more efficiently.

When the switch memory buffers become full, the switch tells the server to
stop sending information for a moment while it transmits the data already in
the buffers.

You might not notice if you are downloading emails, but the storage and
database applications will notice. With priority flow control, you can
prioritise which traffic is paused. Effectively we can carve up the 10GbE pipe
into eight lanes and assign applications per lane. The DCB switch can pause
transmission from the server only on certain lanes and not others.

The same iSCSI solution running over 10GbE DCB versus a normal best-effort
Ethernet infrastructure will provide better performance and reliability.

If FCoE is not your cup of tea, that same 10GbE DCB infrastructure can still
run all sorts of mission-critical applications, offering low latency,
losslessness, continuity, low-power and low-cost functionality that can be used
by all IP-based storage solutions today.

When I look at the vendor choice, price and performances of 10GbE iSCSI or
NFS solutions, I wonder why one would consider growing any fibre channel
infrastructure and having to deal with gateways, along with everything else.